Paradigms of Human Memory (S2, 21 – April 21, 2011)
As Community was so frequently a show about television, it often took it upon itself to take on some of the format’s more ridiculous tropes. In this episode, it took on the clipshow – a relic of the days when show runners would fulfill their contractual obligation to make 22 or 23 episodes a year by filling one of them with clips from other episodes, using some loose premise. “Hey, let’s look at the family album!”
Community’s clipshow features clips from episodes that never existed. They are entirely new scenes, and they serve as individual vignettes that tell a larger story about the study group. It's an experimental (for television) approach to storytelling and it works amazingly well.
